Honour the Lord with your substance and with the first fruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine. Proverbs 3:9-10
“These two verses have been a mainstay of “prosperity gospel”-type preaching for many decades. A superficial reading suggests two related ideas—one general, the other specific: first, these verses appear to suggest that godliness automatically leads to wealth; second, they appear to suggest that the giving of generous offerings of money to Church work or Christian ministry organizations automatically leads to prosperity, especially financial rewards.
In practice, this often leads to calls for people to give the so-called “tithe,” a tenth of their financial income. Such preaching is regularly accompanied by promises that faithful and generous, even sacrificial, giving would make relatively poor people prosperous. However, this is in fact not what these verses are saying. Rather, they are addressed to rich people, for verse ten clarifies that their barns (plural!) and their vats (plural!) will be filled beyond capacity. Only relatively well-off people have a barn or a vat of their own. Those with several barns and vats are wealthy.
What does this mean? Rather than providing a prosperity gospel for the poor, these verses constitute a genuine “gospel to the rich”: Those with significant wealth (they already own several barns and vats just to contain their regular income) are encouraged to put God first in their lives by being generous to others. The motivation for such reorientation and generosity is given in promises—barns filled to overflowing, wine containers filled to bursting—that imply two related but distinct positive outcomes.
The first outcome is that any giving to the work of God will not diminish the giver’s wealth, but increase it. The barns and vats will not be empty or half full—they will be completely full. Giving will not diminish the giver. And the second outcome is that such giving, by contrast, enriches the giver to the level of surplus without excess. Not more barns and vats to be filled with ever more corn and wine are promised, but an overflow just beyond the present level of prosperity.
An imaginative interpretation will ask the question ingeniously prompted by this mysterious abundance: “What is the generous giver to do with this excess of fortune beyond his or her actual needs?” The obvious answer, ingeniously built into the poetic design of this astonishing piece of advice, is this: Give it away! Honour the Lord with it, continue the “virtuous cycle” of abundant generosity begetting generous abundance—not for one’s own enrichment, but for a prosperity of the heart that glorifies God through enriching others.”
Knut Heim is my Postgraduate Advisor at Trinity College, Bristol, UK. This excerpt comes from his article: “How and Why We Should Read the Poetry of the Old Testament for Public Life Today” which can be read in its entirety at: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2981/